1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to educational devices, specifically to instructional tools and their corresponding methodologies for teaching students to read and write, more specifically to instructional tools and methodologies which facilitate students' learning about the structural aspects of using alphabetic letters within written words.
2. Discussion of the Problem
Learning to read is the most important academic skill a student is expected to master. Nearly all curricular subjects require that a student can read and write proficiently. Yet, in his 1998 statement before the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Dr. G. Reid Lyon, Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, asserted that for many students, “reading is one of the most difficult tasks that they will have to master throughout their schooling.”
Owing in large part to this difficulty, literacy instruction has been controversial in this country. Educators have been seen to try numerous instructional approaches and books like Why Johnny Can't Read and What You Can Do About It have achieved best-seller status. The federal government commissioned three large-scale studies, seeking to find the most effective methodologies for teaching students to read and write. The “First Grade Studies,” The Cooperative Research Program in First Grade Reading (Bond & Dykstra, 1967) published data collected from classrooms across the country, including some longitudinal studies which lasted through the third grade. Beginning Reading Instruction in the United States (Adams, 1990) is a review of the research literature found in educational journals and books to that date. And in 2000, the National Reading Panel published Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. All three of these arrived at the same basic conclusions. Among these are that combinations of the widely-used types of instruction generally produce the best student outcomes, and that systematic phonics instruction is an essential component of such a curriculum.
A combination approach to literacy instruction generally assures that written words will be studied, both as whole units and as compilations of alphabetic letters which have been blended together. Phonics instruction teaches the alphabetic principle, that the individual sounds within spoken words (phonemes) are represented by letters and letter groupings (graphemes) when written. An instructional difficulty, though, is that some phonemes like ā can be represented by a number of different graphemes i.e. ate, eight, bait, and bay, just as ē is represented differently in seek, heat, Pete, receipt, and me.
English is a highly eclectic language. It has borrowed words from Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Greek, Spanish, French, etc. to form the largest vocabulary currently spoken, over 600,000 words; larger than our closest rival, German, by two thirds. Each of these root languages has its own orthographic system for representing phonemes with graphemes in written words. Therefore, English orthography is necessarily complex—seeking to accommodate words from each of these other systems. Even with an enlarged orthography, some or our written words are simply termed, “nonphonetic.” Vote, note, hope, and cove for instance, utilize a long ō and a silent e. Love, however, has the same orthographic structure but is not pronounced, lōve. This is one of the principle reasons many American students face such a difficult challenge in becoming literate. An adult, recounting his problems in fourth grade said, “If you asked me how words are put together—my honest, best answer would have been to take a bunch of letters and throw them up into the air. When they land, some of them will spell words.”
Along with letter/sound relationships, phonics instruction generally covers word families like_at i.e. hat, fat, mat, cat, and sat, and_op i.e. mop, pop, top, and hop. There is some division, however, among many educators regarding phonics instruction. Synthetic phonics starts with single letters and teaches students to blend their sounds together to arrive at written words, in a parts-to-whole approach. Analytic phonics starts with whole words, students are familiar with, and teaches them both to analyze their componant parts and to recognize similarities among other words in word-sort exercises, etc., in a whole-to-parts approach. Parts to whole is an inductive process while whole-to-parts is a deductive process. The applicant asserts that students are encouraged to engage in both types of thinking when utilizing the present invention. The importance of this will be discussed later in this application.
Within the past decade or so, an increasing number of educators have stressed that the orthographic structure of how written words are comprised should also be taught, by illustrating the principle of substitution, since knowing prevalent word families can only take students so far. Numerous educational authors refer to CVC words, consisting of an initial consonant, a vowel, and a final consonant i.e. cat, dog, run, and pet. Cunningham's “Four Blocks Program” has such a spelling-based approach to phonics instruction. Calfee's “Meta-Phonics” terms the vowels in CVC words, “glue letters.” Clay's popular “Reading Recovery” program utilizes movable plastic letters in “Making and Breaking” exercises which teach students about blending and segmenting the phonemes and graphemes within spoken and written words, Steed's Touchphonics™ system teaches that consonants can be substituted for like consonants and vowels substituted for like vowels, to form different words or syllables which yet retain the same orthographic pattern. Therefore, cat can be changed to hat, hat can be changed to hot, and hot can be changed to hop. While making these changes, the CVC pattern of consonant-vowel-consonant, remains. This is a more abstract way of viewing written words and their alphabetic letters than just learning sound/symbol relationships and word families. A number of educational authors, Pressley ( ), Adams ( ), and Routman ( ), for instance, continue to urge that more effective instructional tools and strategies be developed to help students rapidly and deeply gain key insights which support learning to read and write.
Literacy is a complex field of learning. One reason reading instruction is fraught with such difficulty is that becoming literate requires some fundamental understandings. However, certain rudimentary literacy activities can be performed without those understandings—at least a firm grasp of them. Because of this, one pitfall a number of students face at one or more stages in their development is that literacy instruction, and its related activities, very quickly changes from being relatively easy to almost impossibly difficult. An educational device and instructional methodology is, therefore, needed which not only encourages students to view written words both as whole units and as compilations of their alphabetic letters, but also supports their gaining essential understandings at various stages of their early literacy development.
To assist struggling students' learning fundamental literacy concepts, Steed (1998), Hisks (1993), Terry (1996), and others teach additional English orthographic patterns, beyond CVC. This helps clarify the orthography of written words in English by showing students how the structural parts of more complex words interact. Steed developed the Touchphonics™ instructional system, which utilizes plastic letters. These have three important features, among others. Firstly, letters and letter groupings are color-coded according to their orthographic function and placement within written words. Secondly, letter groupings are conjoined. The letters comprising vowel teams like ea, ai, oo, etc. are attached to each other, and colored red. Initial consonant blends like bl, spr, tw, sk, etc. are also conjoined and colored blue. Final consonant blends like lf, nch, and mp are conjoined and colored green. Prefixes (orange) and suffixes (purple) also consist of conjoined letters, encouraging students to view them as unitary forms rather than groups of unrelated letters. Thirdly, Steed outlined a program of instruction which covers all the English orthographic patterns normally taught, not just the CVC pattern.
An example of the importance of these features can be seen in a student this applicant is currently teaching. Aside from words which he has memorized, said student has great difficulty reading words which contain consonant blends. He knows short vowel sounds and the sounds represented by individual consonants. He has demonstrated the ability to easily substitute letters within CVC words, changing pet to pat, to hat, to has, etc. Yet, combining the sounds within consonant blends—and joining them with other graphemes in CCVC, CVCC, and CCVCC words is problematic for him. Reading words like fled, mast, and sprung is currently beyond his ability.
The applicant has developed an instructional program termed, Modular Orthography, which utilizes an educational device, such as a flipbook, to illustrate words according to their orthographic patterns. It highlights the structural characteristics of English orthography, encouraging students to gain fundamental understandings regarding how spoken words are transposed to their written form. The instructional methodology for using said flipbook teaches the orthographic patterns found in written English, however, along with a simplified system of color-coding, this applicant teaches orthographic patterns in a different order than Steed's Touchphonics™ system. This educational device has features which make it an improvement over prior art.